It's been a little while, but it's not that I've been staying away from raptorBASICplus, it's because I've been too preoccupied with it, just not directly with this little game idea. Been exploring more of what rb+ has to offer, learning a few more of the essentials, finding some more bugs and rejoicing as GGN fixed them and added even more commands and features.

OK, the game. First things first - I kind of decided I didn't want to do the Moon Patrol thing just now. I don't know what put me off doing it, probably just all the other interesting stuff rb+ has had me doing (dirty, filthy things with varmod/cry/rmw - fun!). But after I got where I wanted to be with some of that, I played BitJag's V0.3 FlappyBird. It's not quite there yet, but it looks the part already. It made me think about SuperFly and how that game concept was obviously similar in both 1-button gameplay and just-one-more-go addictiveness. Then I realised I could take my little horsey diorama and explore a few new areas with the SuperFly concept.

Simply put, I thought a pseudo-3D effect, generated with layered 2D sprites, might be a fun little diversion for SuperFly. Worthy of some head-scratching and experimentation at least. So I set about making a suitably tiny Barry SuperFly and spent a few hours figuring out how to implement the most fundamentally important aspect of the SF-style game - the rise and fall physics. 16.16 pixel accuracy was a struggle at first as I believe I mentioned, but the benefits it offers are really quite profound. I'm not saying what I came up with is in any way perfect or final code, but after a lot of trial and error, I've got it somewhere close.

So Barry is there, flying and his cape flapping in the wind. You can press B and make him soar, or leave him to fall. If he hits the floor he'll randomly bounce up a few pixels as he scrapes his beer-belly along the ground (ouch!).

So that's 28 objects on screen now, not nearly as many or as colourful and eye-blistering as those in my other Jaguar rb+ experiments, but that's only a good thing as there's the super-fun task of creating the obstacles in all their pseudo 3D glory - gulp!

Graphically I've redone the floor, it's a 16 colour image now, not 16bit, but it's much better looking and smoother - more like a texture-stretched surface than a series of banded strips. There's some distant mountains dropped in over the skybox (and so another CLUT section used - 5 left I think) and I've left the horse and its hidden friend in just because. I do intend to make the horse game at some point, this new idea just seems a little more interesting right now... I have kind of considered the two running side-by-side just for extra xunty fun, but I dunno yet. Oh, the very last thing I did was stick a shadow in there under Barry, just a few quick and dirty frames as proof of concept... I think this will be a nice little feature and something really fun to play with if I go overboard on the perspective malarky.

On the music side of things, I got rid of the Beebris mod (yay!) and found some absolutely sexy free-to-use tracks by BoxCat Games. The music included is a section of their track #27 - Against The Wall. It's a fairly rushed conversion to 8bit mono 16kHz, so I'm not doing them justice in any way, but the music itself it so nicey-nice it shines through regardless. I think it needs something uplifting and beatsy to help you get in the groove, always helped with SuperFly on ST and SFDX on Jaguar.

Grab the binary and throw it at your jaguar or VJ and give it a whirl. Press B to rise and release to fall. It might not seem much but it took me quite some time to get that much done.

I'll probably be back with another build by next weekend, if not, you know the FX and tinkering side of things is keeping me too busy, but at least that will result in a release at some party or other fairly soon.

barrified.abs